Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

After seizing Jerusalem's eastern precincts from Jordan at the conclusion of the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel unilaterally unified the city and plunged into an ambitious building program, eager to transform the very meaning of one of the world's most emotionally charged urban spaces. The goal was as simple as it was controversial: to both Judaize and modernize Jerusalem. Seizing Jerusalem chronicles how numerous disciplines, including architecture, landscape design, and urban planning, as well as everyone from municipal politicians to state bureaucrats, from Israeli-born architects to international luminaries such as Louis Kahn, Buckminster Fuller, and Bruno Zevi, competed to create Jerusalem's new image. This decade-long competition happened with the Palestinian residents still living in the city, even as the new image was inspired by the city's Arab legacy. The politics of space in the Holy City, still contested today, were shaped in this post-1967 decade not only by the legacy of the war and the politics of dispossession, but curiously also by emerging trends in postwar architectural culture. Drawing on previously unexamined archival documents and in-depth interviews with architects, planners, and politicians, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan analyzes the cultural politics of the Israeli state and, in particular, of Jerusalem's influential mayor, Teddy Kollek, whose efforts to legitimate Israeli rule over Jerusalem provided architects a unique, real-world laboratory to explore the possibilities and limits of modernist design—as built form as well as political and social action. Seizing Jerusalem reveals architecture as an active agent in the formation of urban and national identity, and demonstrates how contemporary debates about Zionism, and the crisis within the discipline of architecture over postwar modernism, affected Jerusalem's built environment in ways that continue to resonate today.

Israel is unilaterally building a wall to separate itself from Palestine. Within its confines, its citizens have been led to believe, Israeli society can flourish without interruption. This article challenges this assumption by questioning the impact of the former — the external political border — on the latter — the cultural production of Israeli society. More specifically, it explores the formative effect of the shifting border between Israeli and Palestinian territories on the imagination and production of “authentic” Israeli architecture. In this light, architectural trends such as “Bauhaus,” “regionalism,” and “place,” as well as building materials such as concrete and stone, have assumed political dimensions in Israeli society.
Over the last seven years Israeli construction crews have been erecting a meandering concrete wall along the edge of the territory Israel claims for itself. These pale gray concrete slabs are simultaneously one of the world’s most literal, and symbolic, reminders of the importance of the border for a nation’s sense of self. Within their confines, its citizens have been led to believe, Israeli society can flourish without interruption.
In this article, I set out to challenge this assumption. My premise is exactly the interconnectedness of the two — the external political border and the cultural production of Israeli society. More specifically, I explore the formative effect of the shifting border on the imagination and production of “authentic” Israeli architecture. Defining a certain body of architecture as Israeli is contingent, following Slavoj Zizek’s reminder, on
the communal belief that such a “Thing” as “Israeli architecture” exists. The article recounts the history of the search for such a definition, and describes the state of this effort after two Palestinian intifadas and Israel’s unilateral “disengagement” from Gaza. It then demonstrates how the external political border continuously carves a more subtle cultural border that ridicules these efforts — or, to put it differently, threatens the
cohesiveness of what Zizek calls “the national Thing.”

This article questions the official recognition of émigré architect Mies van der Rohe as the canonic figure shaping the International Style as the quintessential American mode of architectural expression. The article examines how historians, critics and curators placed the work of Mies in the American historiography of the modern movement by interpreting his work in light of modernist paradigms that prevailed in the United States from the early 1930s to the years following the Second World War. It is argued that Mies's work provided for scholars of the emerging First World a fertile ground to figure the universal transnational merits of modern architecture as a particular expression of the American nation, spirit and cherished values of freedom, individualism and pragmatic, puritan rigor. Dwelling on concepts such as ‘liberal democracy’, ‘American Exeptionalism’ and ‘the patrimony of a modernist past’, the article examines how the Miesian canon and the image it offered for postwar ‘America’ was entangled in intertwined architectural and national histories.

This paper discusses the tension between East and West not as an essentialized dichotomy but rather as a field of power in which different parties strategize difference for professional and political ends. It argues that such strategies were operative during the 1960s and 1970s formative debate on urban design, for which Jerusalem became a testing ground after the 1967 War. The shift to design methodology on an urban scale enabled Euro-Americans, Israelis, and Jordanian-Palestinians to mobilize the cultural difference between them in order to affect the spatial politics of this contested city.

ABSTRACT Our ongoing reassessments of post-war modernism, known as the International Style, focus on that modernism's claim to universal values. Researchers tend to wed universalism with the accented, formal form of this modernism, detached from all related context. This paper challenges these alleged ties by focusing on the revealing example of Mies van der Rohe, a leading representative of the International Style's legacy. The analysis considers Mies's approach within the intellectual context of its time. Engaging with the beliefs of a half-century ago about the promises and perils of universal values, we focus on the philosophical strains of logical positivism. What we find are shared interests, across the disciplines of architecture and philosophy, which shed new light on the claims of post-war modernism to universal values.

How does new territorial control become inexorable fact?1 How does such fact, based on confiscated land, turn into “a national home”? How does this “home” embody the Israeli “place” even as Palestinians contest possession of the genius loci? This essay examines the legitimizing professional discourse of the Israeli settler society. It focuses on the architectural practices that empowered the first Israeli-born generation-the generation entrusted with Israelizing Jerusalem after the 1967 War. In its efforts to localize Israeli architecture, this generation faced a double-bind. On the one hand, it criticized the high, developmental modernism that had hitherto shaped the state; on the other, it sought a situated modern architecture inspired by the Palestinian vernacular (and thus belonging to the Arab “other”). This impasse provokes intriguing questions in postcolonial theory about how colonizers appropriate the culture of the colonized in order to define an authentic national culture of their own.

מאמר זה יתמקד בפער הרעיוני הבא לידי ביטוי מובהק בעיצובם האדריכלי של שני המתחמים שהוקמו במהלך שנות השישים לצד האתרים ההיסטוריים: המוזיאון לעתיקות חצור — הסמוך לאתר החפירות הארכיאולוגיות בתל חצור; ומתחם קברו של חוני המעגל בפאתיה המערביים של חצור הגלילית. התבוננות אדריכלית באתרים אלה מגלה שלמרות הסמיכות של מועד הקמת ושל מיקומם, ולמרות העובדה ששניהם נוצרו תחת קורת גג ממלכתית אחת, הם דוברים שפות אדריכליות שונות לחלוטין.

This paper examines the creative persona of Erich Mendelsohn's seemingly incompatible bodies of architecture in Europe, Palestine and the U.S. The limits-of existing formal analysis to explain his architectural shifts were the impetus for investigating the architectural position that facilitated not only Mendelsohn's iconic architecture in Germany, but its appropriation to Palestine as well. Beside his artistic ambience, is also Mendelsohn's religious faith, national identity and political convictions. Mendelsohn was part of the Jewish post-assimilated generation in Germany - he extended this experience to the art of building. This extension was facilitated intellectually by Martin Buber's (early) teaching about the creative Jewish yearning for unity.
The paper focus on how Mendelsohn's consistent architectural and political position discloses itself first in the industrial West (Germany), where it engaged the striving architectural debates of the period, and then in the Orient. In Palestine, where he took part in the "cultural Zionist" agenda, he remolded Modern Architecture into a non- Western country.